In the western valley, Wady Bil Ghadir, some of the finest tombs are found, on the side of the hill opposite to that one on which the older part of the town lay. This part is very attractive by its bold and picturesque scenery. Here is a deep ravine, forming an impregnable defence to this side of the town, the rocks on either hand towering almost perpendicularly above the narrow bed of the streamlet formed by its three fountains. Towards the higher point on one side is a small grove of most venerable cypresses (the remains, perhaps, of that planted by Battus), which crown the rock, and overshadow the tombs on the terraces below. The fig-tree, the olive, and the myrtle (here a tree twenty feet high), surround the tombs with luxuriant thickets, out of which streamlets issue, whose course far beneath is marked by thick bushes of oleanders crowned with their rosy flowers, and brambles covered at the same time with their pale blossoms, and with ripening fruit. Some of the tombs in this valley are the most elegant in their proportions, and the most carefully executed of any I have met with in this country; two or three still exhibit the polychromatic decoration of their architecture, and in a few are inscriptions, giving, indeed, only the names of the tenants without either title or date; but even these are interesting, when among them one finds a Jason, an Aristotle, and a Themistocles. The interesting pictures in fresco, representing a black female slave, which decorated the exterior of a tomb high up in one of the branches of this ravine, have been removed by M. Bourville, lately consular agent for France in Benghazi, and I hope that the intrinsic merit of the paintings, of which the engravings certainly make it difficult to judge, is such that their removal may add to our knowledge of ancient art. If not superior to those in the tomb I have described in the Northern Necropolis, their acquisition will add little to the treasures of the Louvre; their absence here is a disappointment to the lover of art. Two of the fountains show the remains of ancient sanctuaries near them, and inscriptions have been found connecting their erection with the name of a pious matron. Many statues have been dug up on the sides of the hill, the best of which have been removed by their discoverers; those that remain exhibit the worst taste in design, and the clumsiest execution; their style is that of the statues produced in the masons’ yards at Leghorn, and intended, I believe, by the artists and the purchasers, whoever they may be, as ornaments for gardens.
CHAPTER VI.
Charming Scenery. — Arab Summer Dwellings. — Ruins of Apollonia. — Ancient Granaries. — Chapels over Saints’ Tombs. — Abd-el-Kader’s Warriors. — Temple of Bacchus.
The Wady Bil Ghadir, the Valley of Verdure, was one of the many beautiful ravines in this country which particularly attracted my admiration; it was one of my favourite haunts; and often did I climb its sides—occasionally at the risk of my neck—or saunter more safely in the perpetual shade of its stream-course. In the neighbourhood of Grennah, the hills abound with beautiful scenes, and these I gradually discovered in my rides; some of them exceeded in richness of vegetation, and equalled in grandeur, anything that is to be found in the Appenines. About a mile from the town on the south, one comes upon extensive remains of a fortress situated on the edge of one of these ravines, the Wady Leboaitha, which runs nearly due east; the valley is filled with tombs, and frequented by countless flights of wood-pigeons. Following the ravine, and turning to the left, we enter the Wady Shelaleh, which presents a scene beyond my powers of description. The olive is here contrasted with the fig, the tall cypress and the dark juniper with the arbutus and myrtle, and the pleasant breeze, which always blows through the valley, is laden with balmy perfumes. In the midst of this wonderful richness of nature appear the gray rocks, hollowed into large and inaccessible caverns, or gently receding in wooded slopes, and sometimes rising perpendicularly, and meeting so as to leave but a narrow passage between them.
Between the range of hills on which Cyrene was built, and the rising ground which so abruptly descends to the sea-shore, the broad plain, which from above seems a flat expanse, is found to be deeply indented with many wood-clad hollows. On their borders, ruined buildings or crumbling tombs contrast with the wooden hut of the present occupant of the soil—the monumental industry of fallen civilisation with the slothful hut of victorious barbarism.
August 29.—It was a bright cool morning when I started to visit Marsa Souya, the old Apollonia. The road follows the line of the cemetery until it reaches the hill whose secular cypresses I have so often admired; hence it descends into the plain, taking nearly a north-east direction. At an hour from Grennah I came upon excavations which must have formed part of the dependencies of a country-house. In a good-sized cave, into which one descends by three steps, is seen a large circular basin hollowed in the rock, four feet in diameter, and standing about ten inches above the floor. In its centre is a square hole, as if for fixing an upright beam. One side of the cave is occupied by a long stone bench, in which is hollowed out a larger mortar, having a slit down the outer side. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was an oil press. The country still abounds with fine old olive trees, but its inhabitants have forgotten their use; when the fruit is ripe, they assemble their sheep and cattle round the trees and shake and beat the branches, while the animals greedily devour the precious produce as it falls to the ground. The plain is in this direction covered with the olive mixed with the caroub, now loaded with its long dark pods. When left thus to the hand of nature, the caroub becomes an immense bush, pushing out suckers all round the parent trunk, which in size is hardly to be distinguished among them. The Bedawin have taken possession of many of the largest of these trees, and make them their summer residence, clearing out the centre and filling up the lower parts with walls of dry branches, above which the dark-green foliage rises with strange effect to the eye, but affording a most grateful shade from the sun. In such a bower I found four men seated round a rude forge repairing broken muskets; while in others women were employed in household cares, such as the grinding of flour, or the weaving of the coarse hair-cloth of which the winter tents are made. From here we turned to seek a pass through the hills, and as the old road has now become, if not impracticable, at least most difficult for horses, we took a path a little to the left, passing over ground covered with old junipers; the twisted and contorted ash-gray trunks of these trees, and their small tufts of hoary green, for they have no other vegetation when very old, give the forest an appearance of decrepitude. The trees look like little old men bent, and bowed, and bald. From this the descent to the coast, even by the better road we had followed, is very precipitous. The supply of water had been forgotten, and a leather bag of milk, offered by a goatherd whom we met, was most welcome. Having at last, after much slipping and stumbling, reached the point where the pass emerges from the hills, we found ourselves in a fertile plain, which it took nearly an hour to traverse before reaching the sea. The water is bad and scarce, and this plain is, therefore, only inhabited in the winter, when it is sown with wheat and barley, and as soon as these crops are cut, the Arabs, with their tents, remove to a station in the hills. The inhabitants were long since in the summer retreat, but we found two men threshing corn by the antique process of treading, which, as all readers of books of travels know, is still practised in parts of Egypt and Syria. I do not remember to have seen the process described as I found it practised here, and there may be others who may think it as curious as it seemed to me. Four oxen abreast are fastened together by the horns, their heads close to each other; a fifth is in like way fastened to the inner one of these four, but the rope which secures his horns is tied round the middle of the belly of a sixth, whose head is in the same way fastened to him. This last pair, when driven, form as it were a revolving pivot, round which the four others move. One man drives them, and another is employed in heaping fresh corn upon the floor, and removing the straw which, by this process, is broken into small lengths, while the grain is, after all, but imperfectly separated from it. Riding on through the plain, we found it, though cultivated, extensively covered with the beautiful evergreen shrub, called in Italy, and here by the Arabs, Baturne; it yields a medicinal berry. We now reached a group of low rocks hollowed out into many sepulchral caves. The soil has a reddish tint (whose reflection is heating to the eyes), which with a bright sun made the ride a hot one. On the sea-shore, just without the town, and opposite to a rocky island covered with excavations and ruins, we found a well of very brackish water, which is the only one in this neighbourhood; the town had been formerly supplied by the water of a fountain nearly three miles off, conveyed to it by an aqueduct, portions of whose ruins we had passed. This want of water renders a stay here very inconvenient, and prevented me following my original intention of spending some days in this place. The city was built on a semicircular line of rocks close to the shore, and buildings are still visible beneath the waters which have here encroached upon the old boundaries, probably by subsidence of the land. The fortifications on the land side are well preserved, and remarkable for a large round tower still almost entire, which rises at the south-west corner; it is connected with some large buildings in this part of the city, apparently of a castle; towers flank the wall at irregular distances, and the position of one gate is well marked, though now blocked up by fallen ruins. Clambering over the wall one gains the interior of the city, which is crowded with heaps of ruins, and presents the same confusion as a child’s castle of wooden bricks when the last story has rendered it top-heavy and the whole falls upon itself. Some arches rise above the soil, and in a few places pieces of wall; the ground is thickly strewed with large heaps of stone, columns of white marble and cipollino, whose capitals are in general of indifferent workmanship. The sites of ten large churches, each with an apse, are easily traced; and the columns and cones of the capitals, adorned with the hall and cross, seem to indicate the fifth century as their date. The difficulty of excavating would be extreme, on account of the size of the heaps of stone which cover the ground, and the weight of the masses; but this circumstance, rendering it almost impossible for the Arabs to make any researches among the ruins, may probably have secured for the first person who is able to undertake the costly task, a rich harvest of early Christian antiquities. The theatre, outside the town, is more perfectly preserved than anything within it; nearly one-half of the seats remain, but the proscenium has long since fallen into the sea, whose encroaching waters now fill the orchestra.
Returning by the same road I turned to the right, about an hour and a half from Grennah, to see the great caves called Maghyenat by the Arabs, and which are, in fact, supposed to have served as magazines for the merchandise coming from Apollonia to Cyrene. They are situated at the foot of a hill, which is covered with ruins, including those of a temple; everything seems to indicate that in this spot a considerable town must have once existed, though the imperfect notices of the ancient geography of this country which have reached us, do not mention a town or village in this place. The caves are very extensive, supported by rude columns, irregularly disposed. One has a square fore-court cut in the rock, and seems to have been adorned with a façade; another has a broad flight of steps leading down to the interior, which is covered with an archway in masonry. There are three of these caves, from 100 to 120 feet square, and they show nothing that could lead to the conjecture that they were ever intended for sepulture; while their situation, as well as the name they have preserved to the present day, render the supposition that they served as magazines highly probable. I found one filled with hay and grain, and another was occupied as the habitation of several families. Turning homewards from this place, and crossing a deep ravine, we reached a very large natural circus at the foot of the hills, from above which flowed an abundant stream. The elliptical form was so perfectly defined that it was long before I could persuade myself that it had not been used as a circus in ancient times; but, though there are remains of building about the fountain, the remainder showed no appreciable marks of cutting away of the rock to form seats, or of the addition of masonry to complete the circuit. Another hour brought us, with the setting sun, back to the tents.
Tuesday, September 7.—This morning I rode to the sea-shore, taking a north-west direction, to visit some ruins, which an Arab had assured me existed there. I was in hope of finding some remains of Phycus, which must have existed in this direction, or of the Garden of the Hesperides, which Scylax and other old authorities place in its neighbourhood. The country as far as the hills differed in no respect from that I had already seen—exhibiting a plain partly of rich soil, partly of rock, and cut up with deep ravines. We rode down the Wady El Agâra, and reaching the hills, found, at a distance of two hours from Cyrene, ruins, apparently of a stronghold, on which is now built a marābut, called Sidi Kelileh. It is remarkable that so many of these chapels, raised over the graves of reputed saints, should be met with in all Moslem countries, and that even the tomb of the Prophet should be a mosque; for this mode of honouring the dead is the object of a special prohibition, uttered, one would think, in too solemn a moment to be lightly transgressed. In El Tabaray’s account of the Prophet’s death, he relates, on the authority of a tradition derived from Aïsha, his favourite wife, that on the day when he died, as he lay covered with a black cloak, his face to the wall, almost his last words were, “May God be unpropitious to those who make the tombs of his prophets places of prayer.” I know not how the difficulty is got over; perhaps, such tombs (being inside the chapels, or inclosed in railings, so that prayers are not said upon them) are not supposed to come within the meaning of the prohibition; in all Moslem countries many such chapels are found, and in no country more frequently than in this, where ignorant fanaticism still exists in a degree unequalled in the other Turkish provinces I have visited.
From Sidi Kelileh we reached the summit of the range in an hour, and saw the sea at a gun-shot from the base of the thickly-wooded hill. Far to the right, the promontory of Nanstathmus, and about half-way between, on the shore, the ruins of Apollonia; to the left, the mountain gradually closing upon the sea, which, a little further on, washes its base; but there is no promontory here visible, nor had any of the natives ever heard of Ras-sem or Razat. The only indication which I could find of a promontory was at a point called El Bilanîch, where the shore makes a very slight bend outwards, and above it the hills rise lofty, and very thickly wooded. A little to the right of the place where I descended we found a spring of sweet water, the only one on this coast—perhaps therefore the same at which the companions of Ulysses landed, when driven by stress of weather from off Cape Malia to the country of the Lotophagi. On the sea-shore, to the left, are the ruins of a strong tower, built of squared stones without cement, called by the Arabs Arbîah, which seems to have served only as a fortalice, for there are no remains to indicate here the site of a town. Further on to the west is a curious shallow quarry cut in steps, from which the stones for the tower seem to have been extracted; and a little further on, a modern Arab khan, called Furtâs, in the walls of which ancient materials are built. Thence I rode on to Bilanîeh, where I found some excavations and levelled places on the rock, which may mark the site of Phycus. The sea-line from here turning slightly west by south-west, there seems no other place which will answer to the description of Phycus. I now climbed the hill above El Bilanîeh, and not finding the Garden of the Hesperides, whose golden fruit would have been most grateful, I rested for a couple of hours under a stunted ilex. The face of the hill was very steep, and the horses had hard work among the smooth rocks in some places, but it only took half an hour to reach the summit, from which the table-land at once extends. Two hours and a quarter west by north-west of Grennah, we came upon considerable ruins, consisting of a large open reservoir; a small building with a well-preserved apse; and a larger one, probably of Arab construction, as it contained several pointed arches as well as one round arch. My guide called this place Shuni. Eastward we met with numerous remains of building and tombs, presenting nothing remarkable; their frequency, however indicates the populous condition of the country in former times, of which another proof presented itself on our road homewards in a large and deep cistern, excavated in the rock, to receive the rain-waters. After my Arabs had drunk of its very muddy water, we rode onwards, crossing the Wady Mala’ab, pursued on our very horses by the fierce barking of the dogs of an Algerian donâr, which had been for many months pitched in the plain below Grennah. Its inhabitants were as fine specimens of uncivil fanatics as one need wish to meet; they did not even deign to call off their dogs when the Christian stranger passed their circular encampment. Their chief is somewhat more politic; he frequently visited my tents, said that the English were good men, who beat the French, and then begged a supply of shot or writing-paper. He and his companions had long fought under Abd-el-Kader, and quitted their country rather than submit to infidel domination.